Look Who Thinks He Can Afford to be a Miserable Sinner

There’s a well-worn Church of England joke that goes …

On Ash Wednesday, the Vicar has stayed after the service for private prayer.  Kneeling in front of the altar, with a profound sense of his unworthiness before God, he murmurs, ‘O Lord, have mercy upon me, a miserable sinner.’

The churchwarden, tiptoeing up to the rail and kneeling down by the Vicar’s side, follows his example and repeats, ‘O Lord, have mercy upon me, a miserable sinner.’

Now Albert Brown, a slightly tipsy and shabby member of the congregation, overhears these holy men praying and is moved to follow their example: he falls on his knees saying, ‘O Lord, have mercy upon me, a miserable sinner.’

Whereupon the Vicar rolls his eyes and murmurs to the churchwarden, ‘Look who thinks he can afford to be a miserable sinner!’

This joke also circulates as a Jewish joke; I’m not sure which version is the original.  But the fact that it is so readily transferable shows that it tells a general truth about human nature.  Self-abasement can be another form of self-aggrandizement: as long as a tender conscience is valued, anyone who claims to think badly of himself can expect to be thought rather well of by others.  An admission of guilt, in fact, is a not-so-subtle claim to privilege. 

I found it a possibly reassuring route to understanding the way that all good, educated, left-wing or centre-left people seem to feel they have to talk about Britain these days, especially in the run-up to and in the aftermath of the EU referendum.  I knew that definitely leftist people tend to blame the USA, and Britain as its satellite, for most of the world’s problems – the problems with Russia, the Middle East, the financial crisis, increasing inequality, climate change, you name it.  But the referendum multiplied the phenomenon enormously.  Suddenly every good person in Britain seemed to be agreed that ours is a thoroughly horrid little country: its national identity a vulgar fake, its history a sorry tale of violence and imperialism, its economy a mess, its culture third-rate and its food and weather a joke.  The IRA and ISIL terrorists were morally preferable to the British state – certainly when Tories were in power.  For ‘Great Britain’ to be finally dismembered by means of Scottish independence, or merged in the cleansing sea of a federal Europe, or, preferably, both: these were consummations devoutly to be wished for by all right-thinking people.

As I read more and more newspaper columns in this general vein, I became despondent.  Why do these people all hate their country so much?  But then the vicar and Albert Brown came to my rescue.  A few of them perhaps really do hate it, I thought, but for most of them – even if they don’t quite realize it themselves – it’s just a sort of terribly British inverted self-regard.  Other countries may feel they have to be prickly, self-interested and boastful, but we should be above that.  And if we’re not, then we can afford to be miserable sinners.

This feeling that the behaviour that is good enough for other countries is not good enough for us maybe rests on nothing more than the twenty miles of water between us and the nearest potential invader, and the concomitant fact that England/Britain hasn’t lost a major war for nearly a thousand years.  That is why, perhaps uniquely in the world, comfortable, educated Britons refuse to be nationalist.  In every European country it is possible, indeed expected, to be both left-wing and patriotic: not in Britain.  When your country has been through an existential crisis within living memory – invaded, defeated, partitioned – then you keep a certain jumpiness about your survival, a visceral feeling that the national unit must be prioritized.  When it hasn’t, you can get complacent.

It explains a certain amount about British government policy over the last few decades, both on the Left and the Right.  Conservative governments embraced first privatisation, then globalisation, without reflexively putting British requirements first.  Free-market dogma meant we sold our utilities, previously state monopolies, to introduce the competition and efficiency of private enterprise – and seemed surprised and pained to find that they were quickly bought up by other countries’ state monopolies.  Governments of both persuasions signed away our fishing rights to Europe in a flourish of high principle.  Green-leaning governments committed us to the costliest carbon-reduction targets in the world: we could afford to be ‘miserable sinners’, and it was up to us to lead the way in repentance.  Perhaps in no field has the triumph of high principle over national pragmatism been more complete than in education.  Those countries that have felt the tramp of jackboots, however socialist and humanitarian their principles may be, will still use education as an instrument of national strength.  They will sit their pupils in rigid rows and din literacy and numeracy into them as if their lives depended on it – because they do.  If the country needs engineers, engineers it will have.  Nor will anyone be allowed to forget about its canon of great thought, literature and art.  But not Britain!  Our schools are ‘child-centred’.  Not for us schools that churn out dutiful citizens, or factory fodder.  It’s about individual fulfilment on the one hand, and social justice on the other. 

This leads to the most ironic consequences of all.  Since the 1960s, when the grandparents of today’s pupils were at school, through all the zigzags of government policy the Left has effectively dominated the teaching profession (have you ever met a right-wing teacher?)  And yet the results seem not to be to its liking.  Since the EU referendum took place, we have heard a great deal about under-achieving, lazy, entitled Britons who won’t do low-paid and arduous jobs – fruit-picking, building, nursing – at a realistic rate of pay, so that the country is ‘forced’ to import migrant workers to do them instead.  These ‘ill-educated’, ‘information-poor’ working-class voters then wonder why the migrants get all the jobs, and fall victim to the appeal of ‘populist’, right-wing politicians who play on their xenophobia.  The irony is rich here.  The willing Eastern European migrants who are now so lionized by the bien-pensant Europhile Left are the products of patriarchal families of the sort that the Left has worked hard to phase out in this country, and of old-fashioned authoritarian educational methods that they would never for one moment countenance being used on British children.  What lefty, now bewailing the perfidy of the Leavers of Lincolnshire, would have gone into a state school at any time in the last forty years and told the pupils, ‘Now smarten up and learn to be punctual, polite and cheerful while working a twelve-hour day digging up spuds for a fiver an hour, paid next week, because that is what lies ahead for most of you!’  Yet that is the message the leftists now seems to think they should have got.   The home-grown working class, encouraged to stand on its rights, work to rule, have no truck with authority, was supposed to be the vanguard of the revolution, back in the 1960s to 1970s.  Margaret Thatcher came along and put a stop to that.  The middle-class leftists still hung on to their professional jobs.  The workers were not so lucky.  Their one-time patrons now disown them. 

After all, the patrons are not those nasty things, nationalists.  They are citizens of the world – no narrow-minded, ‘Little Englander’ attachments for them.  They are perpetually apologising on the international stage for the failings of their country.  Subconsciously feeling, perhaps, all the while, that Britain must be held to higher standards than the others; that only foreigners, lesser breeds without the law, do anything so common as defend their national interests, or react to provocation.  

As Flanders and Swann put it,

‘They argue with umpires, they cheer when they’ve won,

And they practise beforehand, which ruins the fun!’

These inverted patriots simply don’t seem to realize that they are creating an ever-widening disconnect between themselves and the sections of the population who can’t afford to be miserable sinners.  The Daily Mail and Sun readers maybe just want their professional and political classes to be a bit less sanctimonious and a bit more down and dirty like other countries’ leaders; to bend abstract principle for the sake of national advantage and use their elbows on their behalf every now and then.  After all, in the end, while the professionals and politicos enjoy the moral luxury of being miserable sinners, it is the Mail and Sun readers, and the non-readers, who mainly pay for it.